


broadcasting tower

by swordfishtrombones



Series: pick it up loud and clear [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Everybody Lives, First Time, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Canon, a light smattering of internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:21:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24357214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordfishtrombones/pseuds/swordfishtrombones
Summary: He had gotten the story in bits and pieces, commentary from the others interwoven with his own woozy memories. He understood, faintly, that the hours after they killed It were significant for all of them—significant for him. Something in Eddie’s life had been building in the periphery, and its culmination had sped by, not giving a rat’s ass if he was in any state to witness it. All he’d done was lie on the ground like a ragdoll, leaking and gurgling, cracked open to the world. If some kind of confession had escaped him in that state, it was equal to a confession he would've made while blackout drunk, a confession that everyone except Eddie could remember—except even worse, because Eddie hadn’tdoneanything.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Audra Phillips, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, those are all side things just tagging so ppl can avoid
Series: pick it up loud and clear [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768549
Comments: 56
Kudos: 432





	broadcasting tower

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a prequel and you can find it [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24491683)

Richie drops the bomb at the end of one of their early morning phone marathons. 

Under normal circumstances, the conversation would last a lot longer—Eddie’s waking up alone now, and Richie says his sleep schedule is fucked up anyway, so they’ve fallen into a routine. This routine involves Richie’s voice echoing over speakerphone at the asscrack of dawn while Eddie eats oatmeal and brushes his teeth in his tiny new bathroom. Usually the call doesn’t end until Eddie pulls into his office parking spot. Once or twice, driving through Manhattan and talking way too loudly and rapidly for 8 a.m., he’s felt that primordial guilt: the thing he always refused to do with his wife is, for some reason, apparently fine to do with a friend. But he pushes that away best he can. Becoming someone new is an accomplishment, not cause for shame. 

All of this to say, his phone calls with Richie tend to be long. But on this morning, Richie decides to drop a complete conversation-ender before Eddie has even left his apartment, interrupting himself mid-sentence to say, “Hey, so, I’m coming to your dirtbag city this weekend.”

Eddie is tying his shoes, so he can see the moment his hands start trembling. He clenches his fist over his Oxfords and frowns. This kind of thing has been happening a lot lately: sweating rivers in board meetings, or getting off a call with his lawyer to find he’s breathing in fast, shallow bursts. Just the newest development in a lifelong battle, his body on one side, his brain on the other, going, _Come on, idiot, you know better._

He makes his voice even, phone held between shoulder and ear. “Oh yeah?” 

“No, I’m screwing with you. Yeah, man. Upper East Side, last minute event, one very special night only.” Two and a half thousand miles away, Richie pauses. “So I have to come. Dragged against my will. Don’t get any ideas.”

Eddie gives the tension-clearing laugh that Richie is looking for. They both know that _Eddie’s_ ideas have not been the problem. Eddie has wide-eyed speechlessness in the place ideas are supposed to go.

He’s sitting on the plastic folding chair that’s been doubling as a coat rack these past few months. His drugstore calendar hangs on the opposite wall, and Eddie stands, untied shoe slipping from his foot, to stare at the weekend. 

“So, you know,” Richie says. “If you don’t have anything more exciting going on with your glamorous new bachelor life.”

“I, uh,” says Eddie. His calendar is almost blank, and he’s grasping for parameters. “Gotta see my lawyer Saturday afternoon, but I could do lunch. The UES has got...delis. If you like. Sandwiches.”

“Sure, dude.” Richie interrupts himself to yawn into the phone, as if to reassure Eddie it’s no big deal. Just two friends hanging out. “I think I can probably make sandwiches work.”

Eddie texts him an address while they’re still on the phone, a way of promising it’s really gonna happen. By the time he’s out the door, he’s running late, but he’s also chewing the inside of a tense smile. Nervousness is just the other side of excitement; you just have to pick one or the other. Name the feeling, he tells himself as he slams the door of his car. Name the feeling to make it real.

+

It’s not like Richie is the only one he talks to. Bev, for instance. In the months after Derry, Eddie and Beverly talk on the phone two or three times a week.

They’re not really going through the same thing: Bev has a restraining order, occasional tabloid appearances, a lawyer who serves papers in her absence, and justified concerns about her soon-to-be-ex-husband showing up unexpectedly at her new office. By comparison, Eddie’s divorce feels almost simple. When Bev had first called, just two days after they all left Bangor, Eddie had felt a little embarrassed to think of their situations as comparable.

But she had done it for him, sighing into the receiver, “I’m out of there, honey, I’m not going back. It’s scary. But we can do it, right? I think we can.” 

And something tense in Eddie had relaxed. 

Bev tells him each week about her women’s group, which is surely violating some kind of privacy agreement, but this doesn’t seem to worry her. She describes the women who have been leaving their husbands and going back and leaving again for years; the two members who are more interested in making eyes at each other than in participating; the fragile-looking woman who lost custody of three daughters and won’t tell anyone why. 

“If you told 12-year-old me that none of us were gonna have kids, I’d be so confused,” Bev says over speaker phone while Eddie cooks dinner in his Astoria apartment. She laughs. “But also, can you imagine?”

“I imagine it all the time,” Eddie says. He’s sautéing asparagus over a hot plate, not really how he likes it, but the best he’s managed while waiting for someone to come fix the oven. “It’s ugly enough the way it is. The idea of a custody battle…. Myra’s already acting like she’s losing her only son.”

“I know,” Bev says. “It’s sick. Tom too. Like he wants to adopt me so I can’t get away. Thank _God_ we didn’t have kids. No child deserves this.” Her voice goes fierce, the way it does once or twice every call. _“We_ didn’t deserve it. Two hurt little kids. I wish I could go back and be the hero we needed.”

“You were, Bev. We were all heroes for each other.”

“You know what I mean. Kids need protection.”

“You’re a good person,” Eddie says, maybe the most frequent thing they say to each other.

 _"You’re_ a good person.” Eddie can hear her smiling. They’d gone to college two hours apart, the closest of all the losers, but in those four years they’d never gotten together. But there’s still time to make up for things.

“I can hear your food sizzling,” Bev says. “I should eat something too. Thanks for the reminder.”

“Cup noodles for one?”

“I went grocery shopping yesterday, thank you very much. My fridge has eggs _and_ broccoli in it now.”

“Ha. Glad to hear it.”

“Love you, Eddie.”

“Love you too.”

So, that’s perfectly normal. There’s nothing wrong with calling your friends, especially when you share an absolute whopper of a traumatic bond. Mike is also really good about keeping in touch, checking up on Eddie (and, he assumes, all of them) every Sunday, like clockwork. Bill might not call very often, but he picks up when Eddie dials his number. Stanley sends absurdly long texts to the group chat that sound more like blog posts, and which usually attract emoji-only responses from everyone but Ben, who can always be counted on for a " _that's great!"_ Once or twice a month, Ben visits Bev, and they call Eddie, and the three of them have quick, excited talks over FaceTime that make Eddie feel first giddy, and then, selfishly, a little bit depressed. 

Then there’s Richie. There had been a few occasions, right at the beginning, when Eddie had let things get out of hand. The first time, Richie had called right as Eddie was leaving the office, and Eddie (with a guilelessness that feels like stupidity now) had answered. And then they talked hungrily for five hours. After hanging up, Eddie realized he’d forgotten about dinner. It was too late then to cook something without fucking up his sleep, and his stomach had ached with emptiness all night long.

The next time Richie called, Eddie had taken a deep breath and ordered himself to hang up after thirty minutes; and, in fairness, that call had only lasted half as long as the first one. It hadn’t been pretty, though. Eddie can still make himself wince thinking about that phone call. Richie had asked some innocuous question about his new apartment, and Eddie had said it was good, and then, for some reason he still can’t understand, he had dropped his voice low and said that he didn’t like being alone. They’d both been silent for a long beat after that, the corniness so heavy it made Eddie’s stomach hurt within seconds. He'd started talking about the latest season of _True Detective_ in a high pitched voice, but that didn't stop him from hanging up with another stomachache. The whole thing was fucking embarrassing, not to mention a lie—Eddie _loved_ having his own place. 

The third time they talked on the phone was mostly better. Eddie was halfway through narrating pan-frying salmon when Richie cut him off. He had only said “Eddie…” but something in his voice was so alarming that Eddie immediately panicked, hung up, swore, and hastily texted, _Shit, sorry, dropped my phone. Talk later?_

That night, pretending to watch a late-night talk show for his audience of no one, Eddie had flipped over an envelope from Capital One and scrawled all the reasons it was a bad idea. 

  * _far_
  * _myra_
  * _not real_
  * _plan??_
  * _stupid_
  * _messy_
  * _annoying_
  * _**embarrassing**_
  * _FRIENDS = 6. 6 – 1 = FIVE_



By the time he finished the list, he had forgotten which bullet points were about the situation, and which were just general attacks on Richie’s character. Either way, it amounted to the same thing. He at least had enough control to dodge a train wreck when he saw it coming. 

Now, if Richie calls after work, Eddie lets it go to voicemail. He gives himself arbitrary guidelines about when to text back, and he doesn’t check voicemail until after dinner. Richie might not have any concern for danger, but Eddie does. 

And there’s something else good about ignoring Richie’s calls, now and then. It means that later, maybe while Eddie’s brushing his teeth, or getting stuck in traffic, or sitting on his couch and wondering what he’s supposed to do with himself now, he’ll get to unlock his phone and go to voicemail and hear what it sounds like when someone decides that out of all the voices in the world, yours is the one they want to hear.

All things in moderation. Starving people can kill themselves by eating too ravenously. Eddie barely remembers being dragged from the collapsing house on Neibolt Street, but he’s been told that he was gulping for oxygen, and it was that extra air leaking between his organs that had been the real problem. (Days later, when he could finally nervously ask if he had said anything, Richie had looked as if he was going to be sick and said, “You made a noise.”) So the logic makes sense to him, now. Just because you’re gasping for something doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

+

They had all spent three weeks in Bangor, afterward. It felt insane, how quickly things moved. If Eddie was to guess the hospital stay for an alien stab wound, he would’ve said months—or maybe seconds, ending with a residency at the morgue and a throng of loved ones wailing. Instead, the six of them who were still upright got beers and started planning the rest of their lives. Eddie, meanwhile, lay in a hospital bed with a tube sticking out of his chest, relearning how to breathe. 

Just a few short weeks after shoving Eddie’s insides back under his skin, his surgeon had looked him up and down, smiled, and said something about the human body’s incredible ability to heal. Mike, Bev, and Stan had all beamed at Eddie like his survival was a moral victory, instead of the result of dumb luck and swift medical intervention; Bill gripped his shoulder gently; Ben teared up; and Richie (who had spent two weeks looking extremely pale and talking extremely loudly) had gone back to his stupid game of pretending he could hear a voice coming out of Eddie’s chest tube.

A week later, eating junky cereal and watching cowboy movies in Eddie’s new hotel room, Richie had offered, for the first time, to come to New York with him.

“I can drop my car off at LaGuardia,” he had said. “Spare you the bus ticket. And, like, the indignity of Concord Coachlines.”

Eddie had fixed his eyes on the screen, watching the lonesome rancher survey a great prairie. It looked safe enough, but that tended to be bullshit.

“Where would you stay?” he asked. 

“Are you serious?” Richie said. 

Eddie turned his head back to Richie and glared at him. “I’m gonna be busy. I have shit to figure out.”

“Quelle surprise,” Richie grumbled into his cereal. 

It came up a few more times. Richie must have felt bad about that first conversation, because he was more cautious after that. The idea got smaller and smaller, less and less threatening: his offer to stay in the city turned into an offer to get dinner before handing Eddie back to Myra; then it turned into an offer to drop him at his front door; and finally, a slightly snippy offer to fling Eddie’s body from the moving car en route to the airport. But Eddie had deflected and deflected, and eventually Richie had nowhere to go but home. 

In the end, Richie had stood in front of his fuck-off red convertible, pulling Eddie into a tight, brief hug. He pulled back, holding Eddie by the shoulders and looking him stonily in the eyes.

“You really don’t want me to come, right?” he said. “Like—just know I’m very dense, okay? I’m the dude who sends you a bunch of question marks after you ghost me. So to be safe maybe you should spell it out.”

But Eddie hadn’t been able to do that. He couldn’t tell Richie the truth, which was that going back to Manhattan felt like going into battle. It was going to be messy, and it was going to take a degree of concentration and will Eddie wasn’t entirely certain he possessed, and he did not want Richie to be there to see him fail. 

Instead, he squeezed Richie’s arm and said, “Have a good trip, Rich.” That had to be close enough. 

On the ride home, he couldn’t quite believe he had fought so hard for the privilege of sitting in Amtrak’s business class, listening to a flushed man sneeze into his armpit across the aisle. He tried to read a magazine, but whenever he sat still for too long he got that feeling, like someone was scratching the inside of his skin. Eventually he put the magazine down and glared out the window, thinking bitter, circular thoughts all the way from Boston to Penn Station. 

It was not fucking right or fair that someone could utterly forget your existence and still know shit about you. Richie had stood next to Eddie and somehow absorbed his life through osmosis. The job, of course, the marriage, sure—but also secreter things, like the feeling that life happened _to_ Eddie, and not always with his consent. 

No one had made him take his job, or buy the house, or propose—he can’t blame Myra for everything. But he can barely remember doing it. His life was a series of inherited habits, and marriage was the inevitable culmination. When Eddie thinks about himself, the picture he gets is of an empty puppet blowing around in the wind, surprise stitched permanently onto its frozen face. 

Richie should’ve known better than to grill him like that. Richie was supposed to know every ugly truth about Eddie, all the way up to the parts that Eddie couldn’t look at himself. 

+

When Eddie had first woken up in the hospital, he had wanted to go the fuck back to sleep.

It had been Ben and Mike who happened to be there at the time. Eddie came to foggily, looking up through his haze at two huge grins and four watery eyes.

“Did I kill It?” he croaked.

Above him, Mike and Ben looked at each other. 

“Well,” said Mike, and then Eddie passed out again. 

The next time he woke up, the agitated voices had doubled. Someone was holding his hand. He couldn’t tell what the conversation was about, but it was definitely too fast and too loud.

“Stop fighting,” he whimpered. 

Everyone went quiet. Whoever was holding his hand took theirs away. 

“We’re not fighting, honey.” This time, he grasped that Bev was speaking, and he could match her bright, tearful voice to a light touch on his forehead. “We’re just so excited to see you.”

Eddie blinked slowly. He raised his two pointer fingers and gave them a celebratory little wiggle. “Woo hoooooo,” he said. If Richie’s later accounting could be believed, around the fifth O the exclamation had morphed into a snore. 

It took a few more tries before he could get through a conversation without conking the fuck out. In all that time, the feeling of waking up to people talking about him never stopped being weird.

As a kid, Eddie had a reputation for sleeping late. It wasn’t even true—at home he woke each morning with no problem. He’d be sleepy and grumpy in the normal way, but nothing on Richie, who slept through his alarm clock five days a week. But Richie never slept through pancakes at the Hanlon farm, and Eddie seemed to do that every single time. Snoring on Bill’s floor, or on the air mattress in Stan’s sun room, or sprawled across Ben’s couch—Eddie just slept better at his friends’ houses. So when he was there, he slept in. In the morning after a sleepover Eddie would wake up alone and hear his friends laughing, the sound muffled through walls and closed doors, but always loud enough for him to follow. They’d fill him in on what he’d missed. It was okay to sleep through laughter sometimes. There would always be more.

Being in the hospital was the evil version of that feeling. It was like Eddie had woken not to the sound of laughter, but instead to his friends exchanging notes on his behavior and casting knowing looks at his sleeping bag. For days in his hospital bed, Eddie lay uneasily in the knowledge that he was being talked about. And he had almost died, for chrissake. Why wouldn't they be talking about him? 

He had gotten the story in bits and pieces, commentary from the others interwoven with his own woozy memories. He understood, faintly, that the hours after they killed It were significant for all of them—significant for _him._ Something in Eddie’s life had been building in the periphery, and its culmination had sped by, not giving a rat’s ass if he was in any state to witness it. All he’d done was lie on the ground like a ragdoll, leaking and gurgling, cracked open to the world. If some kind of confession had escaped him in that state, it was equal to a confession he would've made while blackout drunk, a confession that everyone except Eddie could remember—except even worse, because Eddie hadn’t _done_ anything. 

It was _Richie_ who had pulled Eddie from the collapsing house and screamed that he couldn’t be dead. Richie who had held Eddie’s face in his hands and put their foreheads together. Richie who had cried onto Eddie’s face, Richie who had let his own tears get into Eddie’s eyes and mouth and open chest. 

That was the first thing Eddie remembered upon waking: the combined taste of salt and copper. It was easier to hold onto than anything he had seen with blood and filth clouding his vision, and the cramped sensation of his insides spilling haphazardly into one another. 

Maybe Eddie had put his arms around Richie’s neck, or, later, opened his mouth against Richie’s face to let the saltwater in. He could have done any of those things while he was dizzy with blood loss and bewilderment. No one was supposed to see you when you were that vulnerable. But everyone had. 

The worst thing was how no one had the courtesy to hide it. The very first day that Eddie could keep his eyes open and his vision straight, Mike had looked between him and Richie and said, “I bet you two need some time.” 

Bill had given a that’s-an-understatement kind of laugh which made Eddie briefly think that he might hate him. Everyone but Richie had filed out, Bev and Ben smiling warmly over their shoulders.

In his hospital bed, Eddie frowned.

Richie at least managed to look embarrassed. 

“Hey,” he said. “Uh.” He laughed nervously. “How’re you feeling?”

If there was a moment, that was it. Instead, Eddie wrinkled his brow and looked up at the ceiling. “Tired,” he said. 

“You’re never gonna have to sleep again after this, Princess Aurora.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Eddie mumbled. He let his eyes fall shut. Looking at Richie was still a little much. “You mind?”

“No, man,” Richie had said, but his voice was heavy with uncertainty. Eddie closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep until, finally, he was. 

It didn’t get better, although Richie himself hadn’t pushed the conversation. Once or twice, Beverly had asked heavy-handed questions (“Has Richie been in here today?” or “You and Rich get a chance to talk yet?”), and Eddie had felt so allergic to the notion of anyone knowing his life better than he knew it himself, he’d given diligently literal answers and changed the subject.

Was it really that important to them, to let Eddie know that they all knew—that they knew what, even? That Eddie’s life was fucked? That it was fucked in a way that pertained to Richie? It wasn’t news. He wasn't some romcom character, dopily waiting for his friends to sit him down and tell him how he felt. 

If they thought they were being clever and coy by watching him sleep and labeling him a tragedy, they could all get fucked. He was in control of his life. No one else. It would move when and only when he said go. 

+

Eddie arrives to lunch five minutes late on purpose. 

Richie’s already leaning against the glass face of the deli, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Even so, Eddie knows him at once from the angle of his shoulders and the way he’s supporting one elbow in his opposite hand. 

Eddie’s chest goes tight, his body doing that thing again, trying to answer another question nobody asked.

He could still turn around, he thinks. Richie hasn't spotted him yet through the slow parade of other pedestrians. That’s why Eddie came late, after all. That’s why they’re meeting somewhere he knows and Richie doesn’t. He’s in control this time. 

He could, if he wanted to. The couple in front of Eddie leans into each other, Richie disappears. They lean away, there’s a slice of long black jeans, a hand holding a phone, a glimpse of a soft resting frown. Before he can give himself one more out, Eddie ducks around the couple, takes the ten steps to where Richie’s standing, and snatches his baseball cap off his head.

Richie looks up at him, eyebrows up and mouth slightly open. 

It kinda feels like Eddie’s got something stuck in his throat, but he swallows it, and opens his mouth.

“Shit, Rich,” he says, putting the cap on his own head. “I didn’t know you were _baseball hat_ famous. Maybe you get some sunglasses too, if it’s that serious. Do screaming teens follow you around? Are we surrounded?”

It’s been three months, which is a quarter of a year. The shadows under Richie’s eyes are less pronounced than when Eddie saw him last, which isn’t saying much. 

“Faking it till I make it,” Richie tells him. His voice sounds good, in that weird, nasally kind of way. It twists into Eddie's stomach the way it always has. Richie reaches for the hat, but Eddie dodges. “You know, Eds, like what you did with Abby Masely all sophomore year.”

“Ha ha,” says Eddie. He puts the cap back on Richie’s head, just to watch Richie let him do it. The side of Eddie’s hand brushes Richie’s ear, and it’s the only place they’ve touched in three months. Almost the only place they’ve touched in twenty-three years. Richie claps him on the shoulder, twice, and leaves his hand there until Eddie steps away.

If it was three of them meeting, Eddie thinks, they’d all be hugging now. 

He clears his throat, worrying inanely that Richie can hear the thought and is gonna do something about it. “Buy me lunch, if you’re that loaded,” he says, and pushes them inside.

The deli might have been a bad idea. There are only a handful of checker-top tables, and it’s too loud for a decent conversation. Eddie usually stops by on his way elsewhere, shoving whole wheat turkey and mustard into his mouth while weaving through foot traffic, engaging in the sometimes-pleasurable performance of _being a New Yorker._

It is immediately obvious that Richie is not a New Yorker, and does not care about pretending to be one. He stands back from the line, hands in his pockets, smiling mildly while the red-faced men behind the counter scream numbers, and customers scurry to grab their bagged lunches and run.

“Cute place,” says Richie. He nods past the counter. “That guy looks like a bulldog about to take a dump on the floor.”

“You’ve never told me your birth story before,” says Eddie.

Richie’s laughter sounds shocked and delighted, and for a second Eddie can only grin at him. But then he shakes himself and gives Richie a shove. “Sit down and try to act domesticated, don’t embarrass me.”

“You’re unembarrassable, Kaspbrak,” Richie tells him, still grinning hugely. “That’s what I love about you.” 

Eddie orders them both sandwiches and waits by the counter until they’re ready. The moment he goes back to Richie is the moment Richie starts to realize that Eddie really is a coward after all, and as badly as he wants to talk to Richie, he’s not looking forward to that. He can’t even talk to Richie on the phone without embarrassing himself. His chances of acting like a normal person face to face are slim to none.

Richie has found a table by the window, and Eddie slides into the seat across from him, extracting his own sub from the bag. 

Richie looks up. “Thought I was buying, control freak.”

“You’re welcome.” He’d gotten something that sounded colorful, not his usual, but you can’t just eat turkey and cheese in front of someone who’s still learning what kind of creature you’ve become. “Tell me how you’re doing. What’s the three sentence update.”

“I’m fine,” says Richie, unwrapping his own pastrami on rye. “And fine. And fine. I hate this game.” He takes a bite, and for no apparent reason, twitches. “Okay, so,” he says, revealing a smear of mustard across his teeth. “Here’s the update. I have to tell you something.”

Eddie groans. “Bad news already? It’s been like thirty seconds.”

“More like, _guess what I did.”_

“What did you do.”

Richie laughs self-consciously and wipes his mouth. “Lied to you.”

Eddie pauses and puts his sandwich down. “Richie.”

“Calm down. Nothing big. You should’ve guessed, I thought you would.” Richie leans back in his chair, readjusting. “There’s no show. Or if there is, it’s got an audience of one, and that one is you. Ta da.”

It’s not so surprising. Maybe the lack of surprise should be disturbing. There’s definitely something happening in Eddie’s stomach, not surprise, but some kind of churning. He crosses his arms over his chest and stares out the deli window. 

“Thought we should get that out of the way,” Richie is saying, his voice inching higher. “Didn’t want to start, like, a _dynamic._ You know what I always say, no dynamics any time.”

Eddie can feel Richie’s eyes on him. Back in high school, sometimes their history teacher would ask a question and go dead quiet, waiting in silence until someone responded. Richie was always the first to break.

Sure enough, Richie barely swallows before filling the silence. “And anyway.” His voice is still laced with bravado, but he’s quieting. “C’mon. We've gotta see each other eventually. Sorry for, like, being a liar. Classic move, right? But it’s not my fault you didn’t google ‘Richie Tozier tour,’ that would’ve taken about two seconds. For real, you thought I was like, ‘oh, just disappeared off the face of the earth and killed an alien clown, but I better scurry back to the clubs’? But it didn’t seem like you were planning to show up in LA any time soon.”

“No,” says Eddie. He looks back at Richie, ready to fight if they’re gonna fight. “I wasn’t. I’ve been a little busy. Getting divorced.” 

He can see on Richie’s face that he’s foreseen this part. And well he fucking should have, Eddie thinks, it is the obvious thing.

“Yeah, I know,” Richie says. “I get it, things are changing, okay, you’re pulling your life up at the roots. All right. Is doing it by yourself really helping?”

“I’m not by _myself,_ ” says Eddie, and it’s true, he makes a point of getting a drink with the guys from the office at least once a month. “I have friends. There’s an incredible group that meets uptown, people going through the same thing. _”_ He searches for Bev’s vocabulary. “Incredible...solidarity.”

“Sounds incredible,” says Richie.

“Well, maybe it is fucking incredible, Richie,” he snaps. “You wouldn’t know, you don’t know them.”

“Hold on, you’re mad I don’t know your divorce buddies? Try introducing me, Einstein.”

Eddie stands up abruptly, his chair making a horrible noise against the floor. Richie makes a sound of protest, but Eddie cuts him off fast. “Napkins,” he says, and takes himself in that direction.

His brain is too full. It happens that fast sometimes, the tilt from fine to overwhelmed. In front of the condiment counter he pulls a stack of maybe thirty brown napkins from the dispenser, trying not to imagine Richie watching him. 

Naming your feelings is good in theory, until they roll up to you in a human body, talking back and expecting you to do something about them. Eddie doesn’t know what Richie wants, exactly, but he has a sneaking feeling that it’s going to involve Eddie explaining himself, and no matter the context, that always feels like a little much.

Back at the table, Richie is sitting with his hands clasped between his legs, looking for all the world like the picture of pious innocence. 

Eddie doesn’t sit back down. “You want to go somewhere?” he asks.

Richie gives him a little smile. “Sure. If I haven’t overstayed my welcome already.”

Eddie sighs. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not that.” And then, registering the implication of Richie’s words, “Where _are_ you staying?”

Richie shrugs, twisting his mouth. _Oh,_ thinks Eddie.

“I told you, man. I’m here for one reason.” 

Eddie chews on that for a beat, then jerks his head toward the door. Richie grabs their sandwiches and follows, his shoulder drawing up toward his ears as he’s hit with the chill. His jacket’s too light for New York October, Eddie notices; years of touring and he still hasn’t learned how to pack. Maybe someone else does that for him.

On the sidewalk Eddie pauses, realizing he’s led them out the door with the authority of someone who knows where they're going. He turns to Richie, the one with all the plans.

“You came to see me,” he says.

“That’s what I said.” Richie proffers the brown bag with Eddie’s sandwich inside it. “Want your thing?”

“No. So you showed up to what, talk? And if I cancelled on you…”

“Thank god stuff like _that_ never happens to me.” Richie crumples the top of the paper bag in his hand and holds it pointlessly, making Eddie realize he doesn’t even have an overnight bag. Just his wallet hanging out of his jacket pocket, cartoonishly vulnerable. “I just thought, whatever. I always like seeing the park. Get some Ethiopian food, maybe those peanuts that smell so good and taste like ass….There’s a five o’clock flight back to LA.”

Eddie checks his watch. “LaGuardia’s a disease, there’s no way you’re making that.”

“So, I can catch a redeye. Or, now you mention it? Think I even heard this city has hotels in it.”

“Don’t be stupid. Come crash at mine,” Eddie says, surprising himself. Then, to confirm it was intentional, he repeats, “You can stay at my place.” 

The expression on Richie’s face is wary. “Okay.” He raises the hand that’s holding the paper bag and rubs his opposite arm with the heel of his palm. “You get, like...you sure you’re good with that?”

Eddie looks at Richie. People pay good money to hear Richie crack canned jokes now, but Eddie gets something better. He gets the funnier version of Richie, the version that’s quick and bright and not canned at all. He gets the version of Richie who will fly cross country like it’s nothing, just in case. Maybe there’s a part of Richie that Eddie doesn’t know at all, but there’s another part of Richie who held their faces together, trying to pour his own life force into Eddie’s body. Eddie thinks, briefly, of what it means to know the taste of someone else’s tears. 

_I know you,_ he thinks. _I know what you’re thinking, because I know you._

The idea of Richie realizing what a mess he is strikes Eddie as almost excruciatingly embarrassing, but the alternative is, what? To let him fly home? 

“I’m good with it, Rich,” he says. “That’s why I said it.”

“Fine. Just checking,” says Richie. Then he grins. “Let’s do something cool.” 

+

No one has visited Eddie in New York before, not unless you count Myra’s sister and her two hyper ironic tweens, which Eddie doesn’t. When Richie looks at him expectantly, Eddie has one thrum of panic, ready to feel at a loss—but then he takes a breath and knows exactly where they should go.

The Museum of the Moving Image is open until six on weekends, and it is one of Eddie’s favorite places. Plus, it’s in Astoria, which means they can ride the 6 train to the N, and Eddie gets to show off about being a local. He never used to take the train, but recently it’s started feeling good. Proof that he can change his habits in small and significant ways. 

Eddie tells Richie boring details about every stop. Good Brazilian food at this one; that one was under construction for months; if you get off here in the summer, you can walk to a sculpture park that’s always too busy, but still a good place to eat lunch. Eddie’s got memories scattered all around the city now, and saying some of them out loud feels like vital proof of life. 

Eddie hasn’t been to the museum since moving, and he hasn’t checked what’s on. He leads Richie through the big white doors, and they both stop dead in front of the banner for the current exhibit.

“Arcade Classics?” Richie turns to Eddie, grinning. “You planned this.”

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “I planned you showing up in town with no clue what you’re doing, and then I also planned to have this show curated, since you’re the only 40-year-old dude in the country who likes Mortal Kombat.” 

Richie puts his hand on his heart. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special.” 

Eddie turns toward the exhibit entrance so Richie can’t see his face, just in case it does something. “Did you see those middle schoolers outside? Let’s get in before they do.”

Even without possessing the severity of Richie’s childhood addiction to the arcade, Eddie feels a punch of nostalgia as they walk into the first room. It’s crowded inside, noisy with families and people on dates and a baby crying somewhere. The exhibit is dark—dark walls in a dark space, each game illuminated with its own splash of light—but the games themselves are all alive and glowing, and some of them immediately recognizable. 

“Holy shit,” Eddie whispers. Something about the darkness of the space calls for whispering, crying babies and laughing kids notwithstanding. He rushes toward the first game he recognizes, which turns out to be Dig Dug. “You remember this?”

“I remember it,” Richie says. He’s whispering too, which makes Eddie feel a little less stupid. “I can’t believe _you_ do.”

“Come play Ms. Pac-Man with me,” Eddie says. “Wait, no.” He frowns, blinking in the dark, feeling a little confused, and also strangely clear. “I hate Ms. Pac-Man. I forgot.”

“You _hate_ Ms. Pac-Man? What’d she ever do to you?”

What did Ms. Pac-Man ever do to him? He grasps for it, and slowly remembers. “What’s she sexy for?” he asks. “She’s a yellow circle. Dots don’t get to be hot. Also, Pac-Man is boring, sorry. No narrative.”

“There’s a narrative!” Richie’s eyes are bright, even in the dark and under his glasses. “Little ghosts, man." He brings his hands up to his face, curled into claws. "Evil little ghosts you gotta run away from!”

“That narrative blows.”

Richie laughs, at full volume now. “Tell me what other totally harmless children's games you hate.”

So Eddie does. It’s a weird feeling, moving from one game to another, having no opinion for a second, and then thinking, _right._

Maybe it’s because Richie clearly likes to listen, but coming up with a stance is suddenly easy. He hates Frogger, NBA Jam, Qix. Richie starts making pathetic little wheezing noises while Eddie goes off on Qix—nothing _to_ that fucking game, just pointless block of colors floating around. Are you supposed to care about your blocks? He doesn’t. But he’s smiling while he talks shit. It’s been a minute since he’s felt so entertaining, but Richie is laughing and laughing, like every word out of Eddie’s mouth is a joke that only Richie understands. 

They try to play Tron for about thirty seconds before Eddie gets annoyed and pulls them over to Donkey Kong, where Richie soundly beats him.

“Why are we sweating so much to save this woman anyway?” Eddie says, watching the game over Richie’s shoulder. “She seems fine! Tell her to climb down herself if she wants to, no reason we should both get crushed by barrels.”

“Have you no chivalry?” Richie’s Mario leaps over a barrel and Eddie groans. “Whose side are you on? The fair maiden requires assistance!”

“What’d the fair maiden ever do for us? It’s not a very equal relationship.”

“Okay, dude, it’s an _arcade game,_ not a three hour wartime drama,” Richie says. He's focused on the game, but Eddie can see from the side of his face that he's grinning. His teeth look crazy white in the dark. 

“I’m just saying.” Eddie leans close, his hand grazing Richie’s shirt. The back of Richie's neck shines pale and exposed, and for a second Eddie lets himself think a crazy thought about leaning in and putting his mouth on it. “You’re pretty worried about someone who hasn’t even bought you flowers.”

“You’re just jealous,” Richie says, and it takes Eddie a second to realize Richie’s talking about his score. But then one of Donkey Kong's barrels rolls down and smacks right into Richie’s Mario, sending him cartwheeling off the screen. Richie swears softly, but when he turns back at Eddie he’s still smiling. 

“You were right,” he says. “She really didn’t try. Guess she’s not that into me.”

“She can tell you’re the clingy type,” Eddie says. “She doesn’t want you filling up her voicemail every week.”

As soon as the words are out he wants to hit himself. Richie’s smile drops off his face. He opens his mouth as if to say something and closes it again.

“Jesus, Rich,” says Eddie. There is no imaginable feeling more miserable than rendering Richie speechless. “Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay,” Richie says automatically. He clicks his tongue softly. “I know you...weren’t thinking.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says again. He feels a little bit sick. 

“It’s okay.” Richie smiles at him to prove it. “Don’t worry about it.” He grabs Eddie’s elbow and gives it a little shake. “Shake it off. Think they’ve got Dragon’s Lair?”

+

They’re there for another full hour, and Eddie does shake it off, he thinks. He shakes it off enough to play Dragon’s Lair (which he predictably sucks at), and enough to make Richie buy him a postcard from the giftshop, with the promise that they’ll send it to Mike, who’s currently road tripping through the Southwest in search of his own perfect home. 

Eddie shakes it off enough that he almost doesn’t feel shitty. Just feels convinced, again, that he is not ready to talk to anyone about anything, and maybe never will be. He's not a very presentable person.

It’s exactly why he didn’t want this conversation in the first place _(what conversation?_ one fraction of his brain asks before being promptly shut up by the other seventy-five percent). Two and a half months into the legal dissolution of his known life, he’s still getting used to living on his own. Hell, he’s still at the point where being able to form an opinion about a dumb arcade game is exciting. If there was a place where grown men could go to incubate until they developed into fully functioning human beings who could walk around without causing pain and embarrassment, Eddie would check himself in. But that place does not exist, and instead he’s bumping around Queens, hoping no one important gets in the way of his chaos. 

The good news is that Eddie’s apartment is a ten minute walk away, so there’s no awkwardness around what to do next. It had rained sometime while they were in the museum, and now wet leaves are plastered flat to the sidewalk, making perfect silhouettes. Afternoon is verging into evening, and the light is changing fast. Richie whistles at the sky when he sees it turning pink. Not the best sunset, but still, he whistles.

Eddie’s street is brick complex after brick complex. His brick complex is special because it is his. Unshared, uncompromised. After taking the Amtrak from Derry to the city, he'd never made it back home—instead, he had checked into the Upper East Side Marriott, given it a few days, then called Myra to tell her he was gone for good. It hadn’t been the kindest way, but Eddie’s not yet sure how to be an entirely kind person. 

Halfway up his stoop, Eddie pauses. He’s been imagining it over and over: what it will feel like to watch Richie walk through his front door. Faced with the door itself, he feels a little short of breath.

“Hey,” he says, digging into his pockets for his keys. He tosses them to Richie. Richie catches, easy, and Eddie’s throat feels thick for no reason. “It’s number four, all right? Silver’s for the building, gold’s for mine. I’m gonna go around the corner, I gotta grab some stuff.”

It sounds unconvincing even to him, and he can see on Richie’s face that he’s being obvious. 

“Sure.” Richie jingles the keys at him. “Weirdo.”

“I’ll be back soon.” Eddie walks backward down the stairs, turns, and peels off in the opposite direction. 

All he needs is ten minutes, ten minutes alone and moving to clear his head. His recent weeks have been a stream of emotional exhaustion, but this has been a big day of an entirely new variation.

People walk by with their shoulders tense and eyes straight ahead. A block over, a car alarm is blaring. There’s no peace in the city, but sometimes Eddie likes that. 

He and Myra had moved to Battery Park City the week they got married. They hadn’t lived together before, which feels crazy in retrospect—just one more crazy thing. She’s back in New Rochelle with her sister now, probably having some very justified words about what a piece of shit Eddie turned out to be. He doesn’t know how she feels about the whole thing, really. Part of splitting up is giving up the right to ask; but the separation has also made it obvious that they were never the sort of couple to know each other like that.

Now, on his own, Eddie cares for the city’s spectacle less and less, and for the city itself more and more. Six years since Eddie first came to New York, it has started feeling fresh again. Six years living indoors, six years of fearfully navigating crowds of fearless people. Eddie is meeting it new, going places he would never have gone with Myra, trying out a new way of looking at an old place and discovering he actually likes what he sees. He is building and moving through his own small routines. He’s finding his own favorite place to get coffee. 

There’s a bodega a block away from Eddie’s apartment that he likes, has even started experimentally thinking of as _his_ bodega. It’s named for the street, and when he sees the name he feels good. He is sharing a home with a bodega that serves its neighbors, and those neighbors are Eddie’s neighbors too.

He doesn’t want to leave Richie alone too long, but he needs something to show for the walk, so he goes into the bodega and walks up and down the tiny wine aisle until he decides a Rioja is safe enough.

Back on the curb, Eddie looks anxiously in the direction of his apartment, swears under his breath, shifts his weight back and forth a few times, then digs out his phone and calls Bev. 

It goes to voicemail. Eddie hangs up and stares across the street, watching a couple walking arm in arm. After a moment, his phone dings.

 _hey!,_ Bev’s text reads. _in the theater to see arrival (!!!!) call you later?_

Eddie’s thumb hovers over his phone screen, and then he shoves the phone back in his pocket. What was he going to say to her, anyway? After all the time he spent making it clear that she was not allowed to comment on the Richie situation, was he just going to eat his pride and beg for advice? 

Maybe Eddie will spend the rest of his life fighting the impulse to ask someone else to tell him what he should do, but he’s not going to do that this time. Bev is one of the greatest people Eddie knows, but this is _his._ If he needs her to point him in the right direction, he doesn’t deserve the destination. He can do it himself: say yes or say no, but make the call, and stick with it.

When Eddie gets back to his apartment building, Richie is sitting on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette. His shoulders slope inward, and the cuff of his sleeve has fallen down, revealing dark hair on his arm that’s standing up in the chill. 

Eddie shifts the wine bottle in his hand as he nears him, rebalancing. “Thought you quit those,” he says. 

Richie taps ash over the concrete step, watching it fall down into the sidewalk. “Yeah, well,” he says. “Turns out quitting is hard.”

Eddie looks at him sidelong. “You didn’t let yourself in.”

Without looking up, Richie says, “You didn’t see your lawyer.”

“What?”

“Your lawyer. On the phone, you said you needed to meet her today.”

“Oh.” Right. Eddie sighs. “No.”

Richie stands up. “It’s okay,” he says. He gives Eddie a little smile and holds his keys out to him. “Come on. You’ve still gotta let me in.”

+

They drink the wine with focaccia and a block of sharp cheddar cheese, the things Eddie has in the cupboard. The wine was a good call. Two glasses in and Eddie is feeling more relaxed. If that's an unhealthy tendency, he’ll deal with it later.

“This place rocks,” Richie says, sitting at the little kitchen counter, sloshing his wine glass with a little too much gusto. 

Objectively it’s an overstatement, but subjectively, Eddie agrees. The walls are still almost bare, but he’s working on it. His one immediate contribution was the calendar. Dragging himself out of Myra’s life felt, at first, like dragging himself into negative space; he needed to give the abyss some shape. The calendar is comforting, in the same way that going into the office can be. Time is moving, even when Eddie feels like he’s fallen out of it.

He’s put some love into the apartment, and it was a good find to begin with. Decent sized bedroom, wooden floorboards, and a little living room that opens onto the kitchen. Kitchen with faux-marble counters and one of those dollhouse sized New York ovens. Eddie spends a lot of time at the kitchen counter, since he hasn’t gotten around to finding a dining table yet. He hasn’t been thinking about the furniture you need to entertain other people, but he's got all that he needs. The first week on the lease he bought new light fixtures, and screwing them into the ceiling he thought over and over again, _yes, yes, it’s gonna be okay._

He does have two counter stools, though, so that’s where they’re sitting, half turned toward each other, the bread and cheese parked between them on Eddie’s one wooden cutting board.

“Honestly,” Richie says, “I was kinda worried when you moved so fast. Don’t get me wrong, totally all for you tossing your life upside down, hell yeah, but I sort of imagined... I mean, it’s New York, man. I imagined a shithole.”

“You’ve heard the New York housing market is bad?” Eddie rolls his eyes and takes a sip of wine. “You’re like a walking Lonely Planet guide.”

Richie laughs gamely. “Just saying! There are places that don’t cost like, four thousand dollars a month. And I guess I thought, too, like, maybe you’d wanna get away from where your ex lives.”

“We lived in Manhattan. And she moved.” Eddie rips off a piece of focaccia. “Maybe I should’ve, but—no. I was never gonna leave.” The idea makes him feel tense. His hand rises to his chest like it wants to beat at his heart, but instead it just stays there, hovering. “It’s my home, too. I fucking live here.”

“I like New York,” Richie says. “No, seriously. Best gyro of my life out of an extremely scary looking truck. And everyone seriously exaggerates the way it smells, it’s not _that_ bad.” 

_“I_ like New York,” says Eddie, still not sure why he sounds so fierce when Richie is agreeing with him. But he feels fierce. He’s given up everything—his childhood, his romantic image of grown up happiness, the idea of what his marriage could be, and finally even the marriage itself. He thinks he’s gotten used to the idea that no one’s entitled to anything—you get what you get by work or by luck, all you can do is live with it—but maybe he does, goddammit, maybe he _does_ deserve something. 

Like Richie is reading his mind, he opens his mouth and says, “You’re not _that_ old. And you’re alive, somehow. It’s not that crazy to want to enjoy your life.”

“If you’re trying to tell me to get out more, Stan has that covered.” Eddie takes another sip of wine, slumping a little over the countertop. Bad habit. He straightens up. “I’m not ready for... The divorce, Christ, you don’t know what it’s like. And it’s not like I’m gonna roll out of that new and fresh and perfect. I spent the past twenty-seven years thinking I, I didn’t even, like… Thinking I was happy with the way things were. Happy enough. I have a lot to work on.”

“Everybody’s a work in progress,” Richie says mildly. 

“Some of us especially.” He thinks of childhood and pills and all the nervous energy wound into one little kid. “Okay,” he says. “Listen to this. That summer—the first summer—when I saw It, It came to me as a leper.”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t think it was gonna infect me. I thought, oh, God, that _is_ me. This is too fucked up to say out loud, but I was genuinely, like, _scared_ of AIDS.” He laughs a little, agitated. “And you know what kind of kid I was. The likelihood I was gonna come anywhere near either sex _or_ needles...but I was fucking scared anyway, with no idea why. Like I was just carrying this secret shit around inside me that didn’t come from anywhere except, like, from wherever I came from. Isn’t that the sickest and saddest thing you ever heard.”

“It is sad,” Richie says slowly.

“Stupid.”

“You’re not gonna trick me into being mean to your scared little kid self,” Richie says. “Who do you think I am?”

Eddie smiles weakly. “I don’t know.”

“Also, you probably needed a blood infusion at some point,” says Richie. “The childhood we had? If you were gonna get AIDS it would’ve been that way.”

“That is beyond not funny.”

“Shit, I wasn’t trying to be, it’s just how I talk.”

“If I allow it this once will you take that as an endorsement?”

“Absolutely, because I know deep down that’s what it is.” 

Eddie snorts. The last of his wine is drying at the bottom of his glass, leaving behind a ring of dark purple residue. He swirls the glass, watching the ring break and dissolve. 

Richie watches him, and then sighs. “I wanna tell you something. But you might not like it.”

Eddie sets his mouth in a line. “That doesn’t really inspire confidence.”

Richie laughs croakily. “I know.” He hums one tuneless note and goes on. “But. Here’s the thing. It’s really hard to come up with ways to like, show you...you know. Ways that I think you’ll be okay with. And really, the best way of all—the only way I really know—to, to show that, is to be here through this bullshit time. I’m gonna...I’m still gonna want to be here. That part isn’t gonna change. I wanna be the boring part. The part that’s like, never ever surprising.”

This stops Eddie up short. It’s a lot to understand. He focuses on the least confusing piece. “You…” he says. “You got on a plane to surprise me.”

“Yeah,” says Richie. “Well. You know.” He does jazz fingers with the hand not holding his wine glass.

“I,” says Eddie. “I know. Thanks, Rich.” 

Richie puts the glass down on the counter and gives Eddie a level look. “You get what I’m trying to do here, right?” he says. 

Eddie feels his face get hot. 

The truth is, he does know. There’s a hysteric part of him that wants to throw his hands up and ask Richie what he wants Eddie to say—but he’d never ask that question out loud, because the scary part isn’t that he doesn’t know the answer. It’s that he does. 

Eddie’s hand comes up to his face without his permission. He fakes an itch on his nose to make it look like he knows how to control his body. “Is it...that pressing?” 

Richie laughs a little bit at that, but it’s not a real laugh. “You know I saw you, like, perish, right?” he says. “You didn’t miss that?”

“Uh, yeah, actually. I did miss it.” As Eddie says it he can see Richie’s face close, just a little bit, and the sight hurts. “Fuck,” he says. “I didn’t mean to miss it, Richie. I kept passing out, I can barely remember anything—I wish I could.”

“Funny,” Richie says shortly. “I wish I couldn’t.” 

Richie has something that Eddie wants. He wants it the way he wants food when he’s hungry, or rest when he’s tired. Eddie wants it so bad it aches, sometimes, but he’s been telling himself that’s okay. He’s used to the feeling of wanting, detached from object or relief. At least this time he knows what he wants, and he knows the wanting isn't going to disappear. 

The thing between him and Richie is a renewable resource. It is, Eddie has assumed, permanent and immovable. And that means it’s okay to avoid. As long as it’s inconvenient to talk about it, Eddie doesn’t have to face it head on.

But now Richie is in Eddie’s kitchen, sitting across from him, asking. Richie flew nearly three thousand miles to tell Eddie that the thing he thought was self-sufficient is actually starving.

He needs to say it out loud. If it’s real, he needs to say it. That’s how you make it real outside of the body, real in a way other people can understand.

The problem with this thing is that it’s too big to be seen. Eddie isn’t sure where it begins or ends. He isn’t sure if it has its own shape, or if the reason he couldn’t see it before is because it wraps to the contours of his life. What are the words for something like that?

“Richie,” he says, feeling helpless. “I don’t know how to talk about this.” 

Richie puts his elbow on the countertop and leans into his own forearm, lightly rubbing the top of his head. Eddie recognizes the gesture from the way Richie used to rub his own arms when he was upset and trying not to show it. 

“If we never did,” Richie says, “would that bother you?”

That’s not an eventuality Eddie has really considered, and the idea makes him feel leaden. _“Yes,”_ he says. “I want to. I’m trying.”

Richie looks at him incredulously for a minute and then puts his hand out on the countertop. 

And Eddie decides this is a moment when he can be brave, and takes it.

He’s holding Richie’s hand now. 

“I’m not trying to fuck with you,” he tells Richie. “I’m trying to be honest here. When I say I don’t know how, I mean I _don’t know how.”_

“Dude.” Richie’s voice is different now. “Start anywhere.”

Anywhere is too big. Eddie closes his eyes and breathes deeply and thinks of the simplest thing he could possibly say. 

“You,” he says, opening his eyes, “are important to me.”

Richie stares at him, and breaks into a grin.

“Don’t laugh,” Eddie says. “I’ll go right back into my shell, I swear to god.”

“I’m not laughing,” Richie says. 

“You better not be, ‘cause I’m about to douse this whole thing in cold water.”

Richie sobers. 

Eddie takes another deep breath. _You ready?_ he asks his body. The hand that’s holding Richie’s hand shakes a little. Eddie squeezes tighter.

“Eddie,” Richie says.

“I’m fine,” Eddie says. “Fuck.”

“Can I...how can I help?”

The question makes Eddie want to laugh, or maybe cry a little. Richie’s eyes are so wide. Looking at him, Eddie realizes how long he’s kept him waiting. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

“What? Eds— _I’m_ sorry, I didn’t mean to—I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable, man.”

“You’re not, I’m just doing it to myself.” Eddie grasps the side of the counter with his spare hand. Now he’s grasping something solid on both sides, he feels a little more steady. He breathes in and out slowly.

He’s aware of Richie watching him calm himself down, but he doesn’t expect him to comment on it. “I know, like, six or seven hundred breathing strategies,” Richie says. “If you ever wanna compare notes.”

Eddie’s breath comes out in a little huff, half a laugh and half a noise of surprise. “Do you?”

“Course I do. You think I can just get up in front of hundreds of people and go? _Me?”_ Richie laughs skittishly. “My hands are sweating right now.”

“I thought that was mine.”

“Whatever. It’s all commingling.”

“Gross.” It is gross, objectively, but it’s not _that_ gross. It’s not like it’s a stranger who’s sweating into Eddie’s palm. 

“I’m just nervous,” he tells Richie, then laughs again at the preposterous understatement of it all. 

“I’m—me too, Eddie. Like, constantly.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I—I don’t wanna be a mess like this, I just feel like, like I’m _just_ getting a _grip_ on things, and sometimes I do okay, but other times I wake up on the weekend and have no fucking clue what to do with myself. I don’t want you to know that. But I’m not—fun. I’m not great to be around.”

“I wanna be here,” Richie says urgently. “Nowhere I’d rather be. I mean that.”

Eddie drops his head forward and bonks it against the countertop. 

“All good?” Richie asks.

He picks his head back up. “I just keep realizing how much I’ve been screwing you around.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

Eddie lets go of Richie’s hand long enough to wipe his palm against his knee, and then deliberately takes it again. “I left Myra two times before this,” he says. “This was the third.”

“Oh,” says Richie. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” 

He had checked into the same hotel both times. The first time, he had picked up his phone to tell Myra to stop calling, and she had talked to him with such calm sadness that he’d believed things were going to change. He’d held onto that conversation for three or four months, convincing himself over and over again that it was proof of something that mattered. The second time Eddie left, Myra hadn’t called at all. She didn’t need to. Eddie had brought himself home in the morning, confused and skittish at the thought of being alone, and had taken it as generosity when she acted like nothing had happened.

“I still haven’t been back there,” he admits. “Not even for my stuff. I bought a whole new fucking wardrobe because I was too scared that if I went home I’d see that I’d made a huge mistake and I’d stay in that house till I dropped dead.”

“You did it, though.” Richie squeezes his hand. “It’s fucking huge. We should’ve had champagne.”

“It doesn’t feel like it. It just feels like I’m so far behind.”

“Compared to who?”

Eddie thinks about saying compared to Bev, but that’s not really it either. Compared to the person he used to hope he was gonna be. The Eddie Kaspbrak who existed in the imagination of that little kid, when any other possible version sounded like an improvement.

“There’s no one else here, Eddie,” Richie says. “It’s just us.”

“I’m so fucking embarrassed.” It comes out as a whisper. “It took me so long to do this. Everyone could see it was wrong, but I just couldn’t do it.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Richie’s voice is strong with certainty. “It literally does not matter at all. You’re fucking brave. No one wants to do what you’re doing. But you’re doing it, and the rest of your life is gonna rock because you’re gonna make it rock.”

Richie believes in him so completely. Eddie is not sure if he deserves it. 

“I’m really glad you’re here,” he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t invite you, you’re right, I should’ve done that months ago.”

“Quit apologizing. It’s okay. We’re gonna figure it out.” The clock above Eddie’s stove ticks loudly and Richie frowns at it. He looks back at Eddie, hesitation written all over his face. He opens his mouth, then visibly changes his mind. “I think,” he says slowly, “that we should go to bed. I don’t wanna know what you look like when you don’t get a full fourteen hours. You got a blanket for the couch?”

Eddie realizes what he’s doing, steering them past the thing he thinks is too much for Eddie in his current state. It’s not right, but it makes Eddie’s chest ache, to feel Richie instinctively looking for ways to take care of him. “Yeah,” he says, and goes to get it.

Richie waves off the offer to find a top sheet, insisting the couch pillows and Eddie’s spare blankets are fine. He even makes the couch up himself, stubbornly, brushing Eddie away when he tries to do hospital corners around the cushions. So Eddie just stands there, between the living room and his bedroom, feeling awkward and useless, and tries to come up with a cool-guy way of clearing out the shit he will not be saying tonight.

“Are you, uh,” he manages instead. “You set? Need anything?”

Richie tosses himself on the couch lengthwise, crossing his legs at the ankle and tucking his hands behind his head in an exaggerated performance of comfort. “All good here, cap’n.”

Eddie crosses his arms at his waist and uncrosses them. “Water? Toothbrush.”

“I can literally see the tap from here. And I’m sure I can find your toothbrush stash in your two foot long bathroom. I claim a purple one.”

“Okay.” Eddie is wavering in his bedroom doorway, but it’s pretty clear Richie is doing what he can to dismiss him from his own living room. “They’re in the drawer under the sink. Brush your teeth.”

“I’ll show you my pearly whites first thing tomorrow.”

“You better. Night, Richie."

“Night, Eds.”

Eddie doesn’t spend a lot of time in his bedroom, so it’s not much to look at. Just gray walls, sliding door closet, and a window that faces the next brick building. Bedside table with a book on it that Eddie hasn’t been reading. That’s fine. It should be a low-energy space. He shuts the door behind him, feeling untethered, and takes a few seconds to breathe deeply. Then he pulls his clothes off, tossing them into the hamper in his closet, changes into his long-sleeved sleep shirt, and gets into bed. He lies down in the middle of the mattress, pillow wedged under his knees to ease his lower back, and shuts his eyes. 

Usually Eddie passes out fast if he’s been drinking, but tonight he can’t quite get there. Instead he turns from left to right, thinking he should have stretched out his hips, even though when he pays attention, he finds his hips actually seem pretty fine.

It’s at least an hour before he figures out what feels wrong. Eddie lies there looking into the dark for a minute, bargaining with himself. Then he breathes, _“Fuck,”_ and gets out of bed. 

Richie isn’t asleep yet either. Instead, he’s sitting in the dark at the edge of the couch in his t-shirt and boxers, his face lit up blue from his phone. He’s switched the lamp off, for whatever reason, but at least he’s still wearing his glasses. One win and one loss in the battle of eye strain. 

“Richie,” Eddie says from the doorway.

Richie looks up at him. 

Eddie puts out his hand. Across the room, he can hear Richie inhale.

“Don’t—if it’s just because you feel bad,” Richie says, but he’s already standing up. 

“Just get over here,” Eddie says. 

Richie does, quickly, abandoning his phone on the couch. His knees and wrists look extra knobbly in the dark. Eddie takes hold of his hand, trying to ignore the part of his brain that says this is too risky to possibly be worth it. Eddie turns, and leads Richie to his bed. 

He can’t look at Richie while he does it, too scared to break this spell of his own strength. But he can feel Richie’s hand in his, and Richie is following him. He’s giving Eddie that trust. 

Eddie is practicing wanting things and acting on them. That is a good thing, even if it means his heart is hammering so hard he’s not sure how he’s going to be able to sleep.

In the bedroom, Eddie closes the door again. He looks at Richie, finally. Richie is watching him, clearly waiting to be told what to do.

“Let’s go to bed,” Eddie says, and gets back into it. 

He takes the right side of the bed, and after a second, Richie settles into the left. Richie lies down on his back, too stiff, like he’s not sure what to do. 

“Turn around,” Eddie says. 

Richie hesitates and then obliges, rolling onto his side to face the wall. Eddie edges closer in the dark. He can hear Richie breathing, just a little bit fast. Eddie puts out his palm and lies it flat against Richie’s t-shirt, pressing into his back. His shirt is soft, and his skin is warm underneath it. 

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Eddie,” Richie says, his voice lower than Eddie could have anticipated. “It’s definitely okay.”

So Eddie takes him at his word, and slides his arm, cautiously, over Richie’s side. There’s a decent gap between their two bodies, so he’s not sure if it counts as spooning, but it is definitely something. Eddie wonders if he’d ever thought, before, that he might someday do something like this. Right now, he can’t remember for sure. He feels Richie shudder hard under his arm. 

“Are you gonna be able to sleep like this?” he asks, quietly. “Do you sleep on your side?”

Richie makes a tiny noise that might be a laugh. “Sure,” he says. “Tonight I definitely do.”

“You should be comfortable, too.” He hopes Richie can hear what he means in that, hear all the generosity that Eddie wants to return.

For a moment, Richie is quiet. Then he cranes his neck to look at Eddie. The whites of his eyes cut through the dark room the way they had in the museum, and when Eddie swallows the noise seems inappropriately loud. 

“I’m comfortable,” Richie says. “But, you know, being comfortable isn’t—it’s not the only thing.”

Maybe that’s true. The city outside is loud and smoggy. You get shoved on the subway, and there’s nowhere to be alone. It’s also Eddie’s home, and he’s alive here. In the present, he has sacrificed his knee pillow to Richie’s side of the bed, so his back feels a little more crunched than normal, but he can feel himself settling anyway. Once he’s asleep, he sleeps soundly.

+

Sunday is usually Eddie’s worst day of the week. 

This one isn’t so bad. 

He and Richie had woken up around the same time. Incredibly, Eddie still had his arm across Richie’s body, although Richie had turned onto his stomach in the night. They had exchanged sheepish smiles and gotten out of bed quickly, Richie moving into the living room to find his jeans while Eddie got dressed in the bedroom. It wouldn't have worked, Eddie supposes, to linger in bed. 

Richie is sitting at the counter while Eddie uses a pair of chopsticks to stir scrambled eggs over the stovetop. He’s making the best kind of scrambled eggs, the kind that needs attention and time. Richie is supposed to be slicing a tomato, but what he’s doing in practice is complaining about the sound coming from Eddie’s radiator, punctuated with occasional gesticulations with the knife. 

“This is exactly the problem with New York,” Richie says as the radiator groans. “It wants to be, like, an Edith Wharton novel and a modern metropolis at the same time, and the compromise you get is that your power’s never gonna go out, but your apartment will scream at you. Like, the subway stations are tiled, but you will not get reception on the train.”

“Which part of that is the Edith Wharton novel?” Eddie asks, watching the eggs turn gently opaque. 

“Tiled train stations? Fancy city shit? You know I’m a dropout, man, leave me alone.”

The fact that Richie dropped out of school does not change the fact that he’s always been one of the smartest people Eddie knows, no more than it changes the fact that when they were growing up, only Bill could devour books faster. The bagels pop before Eddie can talk himself into saying this out loud, and he moves to grab them, but Richie is already off his chair. He opens Eddie’s cupboards at random, searching for plates. In his peripheral vision, Eddie watches Richie get to know the layout of his kitchen.

The sight gives him the weirdest, stillest feeling. There’s nowhere to be but here. When was the last time Eddie felt like that? When he was a kid, maybe—him and Richie and the rest of their friends sitting motionless under the apple trees behind the Hanlon farm, trying not to startle one of Stan’s birds.

He could name this feeling, he thinks. It had felt so big last night, too big to see and too big to say. But in the light of day, still and quiet in his kitchen, he thinks he could. If he stood up straight and kept his gaze steady and tried. 

“Forks and knives,” he says. Richie surveys the kitchen drawers and opens the right one on the first try. 

Jesus Christ, Eddie thinks.

“Want me to plate ‘em?” Richie asks, nodding at the eggs. He twirls an invisible mustache. “I worked at this fake ass French restaurant for like three years, I can do it _très bien.”_

“Richie,” Eddie says. 

Richie, the bravest person in the world, doesn’t stumble or panic at the sound of his own name. He just looks at Eddie, and he’s gone quiet and soft enough that Eddie knows he understands what’s coming.

Eddie puts his hand on Richie’s bare forearm. Richie’s arm is cool—bad circulation, been like that since he was a kid—and Eddie wants to warm it up, so he rubs it gently as he leans forward, and cranes his neck, and kisses him. 

He makes it soft and brief. The idea is to make it real. The idea is to say yes.

His heart is already pounding harder than he knew it could, something indescribable happening in his stomach. He thought he could control this? He thought that he could help it if he wanted to?

Maybe he could've, if he kept putting it off forever. That's the thing, isn't it. Nothing's inevitable—not the things he wants and not the things he doesn't. It all depends on him, and on Richie, and on finding a corresponding way to be brave. 

Eddie pulls back, his hand shaking a little on Richie's arm. The look on Richie's face isn't one he's ever seen before, at least not aimed at him. Richie looks melted, a little, his mouth soft and his eyes unfocused, but when Eddie pulls far enough away that they can make eye contact, Richie smiles.

"I didn't…." Eddie says. "I want you to know, I always… I didn't think this wasn't going to happen. I just thought I had to wait."

The safe thing about the future is you never get there. _The future is now!_ Eddie thinks ludicrously, thinks it in Richie's voice, and wants to laugh, and wants to put his face in Richie's t-shirt.

“Can—come here,” Richie says, and puts his arms around Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie wraps his arms around Richie's waist without responding, and relaxes into the feeling of Richie holding onto him. 

He hasn't been held like this by a man before. Other things, once or twice in college, wasted to the point of plausible deniability, but not this. When he'd thought about it, shame-faced in the shower or lying awake in the spare room, he'd made himself sick with anxiety imagining that it would change the way he felt in his own body, to be touched by someone who looked and felt like Richie. 

It's sort of true. He feels different with Richie's arms around his shoulders. But it's not the terrifying loss of control he'd imagined. It feels like the place where his body is supposed to be. He hasn't really accounted for this, the possibility that the change might be a return to a natural path, even if making the shift itself goes against all the old instincts.

Food waste is not romantic, though, so after a minute Eddie disentangles, something in him aching, and tries to keep his breath steady while he picks up the plates Richie had found and serves them breakfast. 

Richie hooks his chin over Eddie's shoulder. "Still good?" he asks, soft and a little bit croaky himself. 

"Yeah." Eddie hands him a plate and smiles over his shoulder. "I’m good."

They eat. It's hard not to touch, the magnetic pull that's always existed between them newly focused and intensified, and Eddie keeps pressing his ankle against Richie's without planning to do it. The radiator starts acting up again, and Richie talks back, saying "That is just like her," and "She didn't!" between clangs. Eddie laughs for him, remembering what Richie had said about coming to New York to play for an audience of one. 

When they're done eating Eddie slides Richie's plate onto his, takes them to the sink, and turns.

“Thanks,” he says, one more time. “Again. Thanks for coming, and for being, like, good about this whole thing.”

“Like I said,” Richie says. “Nowhere I’d rather be. You know that.”

“Yeah.” Without realizing, Richie has put his finger on it, the core of the matter. “You _let_ me know it. I’d—if you didn’t, I think I’d fucking lose it."

"International man of mystery Eddie Kaspbrak. I think calling me six times a week was a pretty good clue." 

Eddie flushes and groans. “God, I’ve been a fucking mess. It was like a split brain thing, I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. No more of that, Rich, I swear, I’m getting my shit together.”

“Stop it. You’re doing fine.” Richie leans against the side of the counter, looking at Eddie carefully, considering. “Trying to tell _me_ about being a mess. Wanna hear about mess?” Richie laughs roughly. “When I was a kid. When we were kids. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, right, and I’d try to tell if everyone else was asleep. And if I thought they were, I’d wake myself up all the way, and I’d just lie there and say your name. Like, really quietly, but out loud. My mom probably walked by at some point and thought I was deeply brain damaged, whispering your name in the middle of the night.” 

Eddie swallows hard. “You can’t just,” he says, and trails off. “Fuck.” 

“Well,” says Richie. “It’s true.”

Eddie stands up. “I know this is all necessary,” he says, “But maybe it’s just not my fucking love language. Come here.”

For the second time in twelve hours, Eddie takes Richie to his bed.

He backs Richie up to the edge of the bed and pulls his face down between his hands. Richie’s mouth is open when Eddie pulls them together, and it makes the kiss turn different quickly, going hot and slick and hungry. Eddie feels Richie’s hands at his waist, grabbing his shirt in tense fists, like he needs something to hold onto. The tip of Richie’s tongue is in Eddie’s mouth, and the feeling shocks him all through his body—he’s done this before, but it’s never been like _this_ before, nerves roaring awake not just in his mouth, but all the way down his arms and spine and shaky legs. 

Eddie breaks away in a minute, not wanting to, but panting for air. With their mouths apart he can hear Richie breathing in that too-excited way, and then Richie drags his mouth across Eddie’s cheek, landing an uncoordinated kiss on the side of Eddie’s face, and down in a greedy line to his neck and a spot behind Eddie’s ear that makes him gasp.

“Fuck,” Eddie says stupidly, hands sliding from Richie’s face so he can wrap his arms around his neck, holding him close while Richie sucks against his collarbone. “Wait, I want to—” 

He drops his hands again, pawing clumsily at the hem of Richie’s t-shirt. Richie, thank god, gets the hint, and pulls away. He puts his arms in the air obediently so Eddie can pull off his shirt. Eddie does it, quick and grateful, but he also thinks with a burst of fire, _who has been undressing you?_

The heat in that thought is another answer, another thing Eddie must have been stupid to think he could just ignore. Richie needs to _know,_ so Eddie tries to tell a different way—he grabs Richie's face again, and pushes against him so hard that Richie is forced to sit on the bed.

From there they can look at each other, and that's a whole new kind of craziness. Richie looks windswept, his hair messed up in a way Eddie doesn't remember causing. Cheeks pink, breath coming out in sweet little shocks, pale chest rapidly rising and falling. Eddie can _see_ how turned on he is, and isn't that crazy, to be wanted like that, so much it makes it hard to do anything else, even to breathe.

Eddie wonders if Richie can see the same thing written on his own face. 

"I want you so fucking bad," he says, to be safe.

Richie looks like he's about to pass out.

"You're being quiet," Eddie says.

"I'm worried," says Richie slowly, "that if I talk I'm gonna find out this isn't real."

Eddie's stomach swoops. "Move up," he says softly. Richie drags himself farther onto the mattress, and Eddie climbs into his lap. Richie is supporting himself with his hands flat on the bed, but when Eddie moves in to kiss him, slow and deep, Richie moans into Eddie's mouth and moves one hand to the nape of his neck, pulling him closer.

"Eds, Eddie," he says, muffled by Eddie's mouth, and that shouldn't make Eddie crazier but it does. He doesn't want to stop, even as he's becoming too aware of his dick, heavy and sensitive, rubbing uncomfortably against the front of his jeans. He leans away, takes a breath, and pulls off his own shirt.

Like ripping off a bandage. 

He doesn’t mind the way the scar looks, really. It healed fast, freakishly fast, in a way he can’t imagine is entirely natural. It has become one twisted white starburst below his heart, anchored by a much neater reddish slash curving along his side. Eddie has spent hours staring at it, tracing it with his finger while lying alone in bed. _This is my body,_ he’d told himself, over and over until he understood. _This is my body, I live in this body, and this is what it looks like now._ It had even been helpful, in a way, although he knew better than to say so out loud.

Now, he watches Richie carefully for a reaction. Richie puts his hand on Eddie’s waist, inching it up toward the scar.

“Richie,” Eddie says, needing something. 

“It looks so much better,” Richie says, his voice thick. 

Eddie pulls him back in for another kiss. Richie is the one to break away this time, looking destroyed. 

"Please," Richie says, "Can I, I, I wanna suck your dick."

Eddie feels a rush of heat to his face. "Fuck, Richie, how can you just—”

Richie ignores him, shifting his weight so Eddie has to get off his lap. Richie slides off the bed, going down on his knees. Eddie turns to face him, and isn't that a fucking sight, Richie splotchy with desire on the ground between Eddie's legs.

"Do you want me to?" Richie asks. "We don't have to."

Eddie must not be breathing too great either, because for a second he actually feels dizzy.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I want that."

Even with his breath coming rough and urgent, Richie finds a second to grin at him. Then he's grappling with Eddie's fly, wordlessly urging Eddie to rise off the bed enough that he can get his jeans off. 

Eddie falls back against his mattress, arms at his sides, overwhelmed. Richie's hands are rubbing gently up and down his thighs, and he's got to be right on level with Eddie's dick now, getting an eyeful of it straining against fabric. 

Gently, Richie's hands come up to the waistband of his boxer briefs and pull it down. 

That's the scariest part, surely. Eddie wishes he'd gotten up early and showered, or did whatever it is that you're supposed to do to make yourself presentable. Richie is looking at him now, so that ship has sailed. His stomach is twisted with anxiety, not knowing what Richie's thinking, but the other side of anxiety is a vulnerable, shocky kind of excitement. Richie is going to put his dick in his mouth.

 _I want to see it,_ he thinks, and then feels a twinge of ancient shame in his stomach.

“You okay?” Richie asks. 

Eddie doesn’t know how Richie knows to ask that question, but in the act of asking, he has made the answer yes. Eddie nods. He comes up on his elbows, and is immediately glad he did—the way Richie looks is beyond anything he could have imagined, because Richie’s _here,_ and he's real. Eddie reaches down and touches Richie’s cheek. 

Richie smiles at him, reassuring, and gently takes him in hand. 

Eddie looks back up at the ceiling, face feverishly hot. After a moment of stillness he looks down, ready to ask if everything’s okay—visions of Richie suddenly disgusted and ashamed burning in his mind—but Richie is just looking, his eyes soft, his mouth slightly open. And then he leans forward, and puts his mouth on the side of Eddie’s dick, running down its length, exploratory. He presses his tongue against the underside, dragging it away until he can wrap his mouth around the head.

Immediately, Eddie is breathing even harder and faster. It takes all his strength not to roll his hips and fuck up into the soft heat of Richie's mouth. He puts his weight on one elbow and scrabbles for something to hold onto with the other hand. It lands on Richie’s shoulder, and Eddie grabs on as tight as he can, the muscles of his arm and shoulder and abdomen all tense with the effort to not shake apart into a thousand pieces. 

Richie does something with his tongue that leaves no room for thought, and Eddie gives a whining noise he’s never heard himself make before. He can hear himself letting out a frantic breathy noise, can feel it in his vocal chords when the noise changes from a pant to a long high moan. 

"Jesus," he hisses, "fuck."

The feeling is so much, so all-consuming, Eddie can barely keep track of what's actually happening. He can feel Richie slowly sinking his mouth farther onto his cock, and easing back up, stopping where his hand is wrapped around Eddie—and then gaining speed, finding a rhythm. 

Eddie’s mouth is open. Even his jaw feels tense.

Richie moans as he pulls back, a desperate noise while he twists his hand around the shaft of Eddie’s cock and sucks the head back into his mouth. The sound of it shocks Eddie all over again.

 _God,_ Eddie thinks. His head falls back, mouth gasping. _He’s doing this for himself. He’s doing it because he wants to._

That’s a brand new feeling.

If they keep like this much longer Eddie is going to come in Richie's mouth. Maybe Richie wouldn't mind that—maybe he'd like it, even, an idea that makes Eddie shake harder—but Eddie doesn't want to finish like that. Not the first time.

"Rich," he gasps, pulling himself up taller, "stop."

Richie pulls off fast at the word _stop,_ looking up at Eddie with big dark eyes. His glasses have been knocked crooked and smudged, and his mouth is shining with spit. 

Eddie reaches for his arms, guiding him onto his feet.

“C’mere,” he says, and pulls Richie onto the bed. 

Richie comes down on top of Eddie. They’re both half hanging off the mattress in a way that will not be comfortable for long, but still, Eddie can’t help but arch into it. There are red marks on Richie’s shoulder where Eddie had gripped him too hard. Eddie kisses messily into Richie’s mouth, lifting his hand to his chin and stroking his thumb over Richie’s bottom lip. This is the mouth he loves, he thinks deliriously, this is the mouth that has wrapped around him, the mouth that moaned while doing it.

“You’re gonna kill me,” Richie says. He sounds hoarse, maybe from arousal or maybe from having had Eddie’s _dick in his throat—_ the reality of that is going to keep hitting Eddie over and over again. 

“No I’m not,” Eddie tells him. Richie’s resilient. If one of them is gonna die of this, it won’t be him. Eddie shoves his hand down between them, yanking at Richie’s jeans. “Get these off.” 

Richie wriggles out of his jeans, then looks at Eddie questioningly. Eddie pushes his chest, making Richie roll over, his head on Eddie's pillow. 

"Lie like this," Eddie says softly, sitting back on his heels.

Richie's dick is tenting his boxer briefs, and he's breathing shallowly again, eyes full of eagerness so bright it almost looks like he’s about to cry. The sight of him like that makes Eddie feel furiously hungry, and he leans down, covering Richie's body with his own to give him another kiss. He slides his hand over Richie's stomach and onto his hard cock. It's burning hot even through the fabric, the hottest part of Richie's normally cool body.

Eddie’s one free hand is useless, so Richie helps him, shimmying inelegantly until there’s nothing between them, just skin. Eddie inhales sharply when he sees—Richie is big, a perfect handful, and he's also so hard it looks painful, already leaking a little bit against his stomach. 

He feels it sharply, then. He wants to bracket Richie’s head in his arms and make him look at Eddie, only Eddie, for the rest of time. He wants to move Richie around and tell him what to do, to be the one who knows him well enough to take care of him like this.

Richie has been asking and asking for this. Eddie’s crazy about him for it.

Eddie swings his leg to straddle Richie’s thighs. He offers Richie the palm of his hand.

“Lick it,” he says. 

Richie groans, and does.

Eddie spits into his hand for good measure, like a swear, and wraps it around Richie’s heavy cock.

“Fuck,” says Richie, “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—”

He sounds so good, and Eddie wants to hear him, but he also wants to eat the words right out of his mouth. Eddie leans forward, stroking Richie steadily, and stifles his voice with a kiss.

Eddie breaks away, panting, and holds himself steady above Richie on the strength of one arm. He can look into Richie’s face this way, watch every secret it gives away while Eddie twists his hand around him. His arm is already burning a little, but he doesn't think this'll last long, and fuck if he wouldn't rise to the occasion if it did.

“Is it good?” he asks. “This what you need, baby?”

He hadn’t planned on the endearment, but Richie nods frantically, face scrunched up tight and desperate, so it must be okay. Saying it out loud makes something in Eddie crack open a little more, too. He shifts, pushing his own hard dick against Richie’s, grinding down on it while he moves his hand. 

Richie releases a barely-human cry, throwing back his head, and comes in pulses over Eddie’s hand.

Eddie swears, sitting up on Richie’s thighs. His hand is coated in come and spit, and that's disgusting, he's pretty sure, but right now the mess of it makes his stomach ache in the best way. Richie looks so open, gasping, recovering. Eddie moves his stabilizing hand to the center of Richie's broad chest, and stares at Richie while he takes himself in his fist, and jacks himself fast and hard. In moments he's coming too, folding forward helplessly and spilling onto Richie’s abdomen.

Richie's eyes trace down to the mess on his stomach, and back up to lock with Eddie's.

"Whoa," says Richie, gravelly.

Absolutely braindead, Eddie peels himself off of Richie and collapses onto the bed. 

"Yeah," he says.

He could fall asleep right now with no problem, cramped muscles or not. Instead, he turns onto his side toward Richie, puts his less gross hand on Richie's face, and kisses him. 

"Sorry," he says, "for the, uh…"

Richie laughs out loud at that. "You're good," he says. "I liked it."

That makes Eddie's stomach feel heavy with want again, but he still leans off the bed to grab a discarded pair of boxer briefs, wiping off his hand and Richie's stomach. 

Richie catches his wrist when he's done. 

“Hey, Eddie,” he says, and swallows, and sits up higher. 

Eddie wants to go shower—already imagining what it'll be like to shower with Richie, wondering if Richie will let Eddie wash his hair for him—but he turns on his side sleepily to look at Richie. 

"Yeah?" he says.

"You know _The Bachelor?”_

"Uh.” Eddie puts his hand up and wraps a finger around one of Richie’s soft curls, trying to concentrate. “I'm familiar."

"You know how they—” Richie says, and scrunches up one eye, and keeps going. “The people on it, they draw it out forever. I get it, you know—they make the runway really long so they can stick the landing. They're always like, ‘I think I’m starting to fall for you,’ and then, like, days later, ‘I _am_ falling for you.' Well. Not even any of that shit. I’m already…. Sorry I can't be more chill. I just love you. I love you. I’m in love with you.”

Here it is. Eddie wishes he'd been the one to say it first, but _it's not a competition, Eds,_ even if some part of him still feels like he has something to prove.

He sits up and looks Richie in the eye. He knows his face doesn't look the way Richie's does, not soft like that, but Richie has always been able to read him. Eddie doesn't know how to look any way other than how he feels, and how he feels is like he wants to burn himself into Richie, or open his chest back up and let him in.

"I love you too," Eddie says. "For—a really long time."

Forever, is what he means. Before he knew that he did—before he even knew there was a world where such a thing was possible. He'll say that later, though, when he's gotten in a little more practice. There's time.

Richie holds his gaze with perfect stillness for a beat, and then Eddie can _see_ water gathering in his eyes, about to spill.

"Whoops," says Richie when it does overflow, and laughs.

"You big baby," Eddie says, and nuzzles his face against Richie's neck.

He thought he'd needed to say it so Richie would know, but the words are also pouring back into Eddie, doing something he wasn't expecting. _I love him,_ he thinks, the knowledge of it shooting through him, as big as his whole life, warming him from the inside out. _This is the arm that I love. This is the chest that I love._

He's not Richie, but the impulse to cry is kind of understandable. 

"I can't believe you compared us to _The Bachelor,"_ he says into Richie's neck. _"Unfavorably._ You know that they all know each other for like, three weeks, right? I think our runway is longer, Rich."

Richie laughs thickly and wraps his arm around Eddie, squeezing him. 

“That was some speech, though," Eddie says.

"ABC owes me money," Richie says, still sounding a little shaky. 

"How’d saying that feel compared to whispering my name in the middle of the night?”

Richie brushes his hand over Eddie's forehead, smoothing back his hair. “You know what,” he says, and laughs again, self-conscious. “Pretty much the same."

+

Eddie does get Richie into the shower, eventually. Richie even lets Eddie wash his hair, brushing suds backwards so they run down his back and shoulders, not into his eyes. Richie’s body already feels different than any other body Eddie has ever touched, but it feels new in another way under the soapy water, so relaxed and dazed with happiness. They waste a lot of water that way, which Eddie swears will not become a regular thing. It’s still a little odd, to be this naked in front of someone. It's just Richie, though. Just Richie and him, like always.

They haven’t talked yet about when Richie should be heading home, and Eddie finds he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to when they emerge from the shower, fresh and clean, or when they curl up on Eddie’s little loveseat (Richie wearing one of the three identical white t-shirts Eddie had bought the same day he signed his lease). Eddie goes grocery shopping on Sundays, so they do that together, walking to Key Foods with two of Eddie's reusable shopping bags shoved into Richie's pocket. Eddie doesn't want to talk about Richie leaving when he catches Richie smiling at him while he picks disgustedly over a stack of squishy onions. He doesn't want to talk about it later that night, pressed against Richie in the living room, a saucepan of gluten-free spaghetti on the stove and _Junior_ on mute on the TV. The only thing he wants to do is draw the curtains around them and talk, and laugh, and get acquainted in this new way. 

Eddie takes Monday off, and then, somewhat guilty, goes back into the office for three and a half agonizing days. Richie insists he doesn’t mind. He had spent months at a time in New York, early in his career, and he’s still got a handful of people worth looking up. It only makes sense for Richie to take this chance to pay those overdue visits, just like it only makes sense that he should continue to sleep in Eddie’s bed, and that they should let the question of his return home slip quietly under the rug. 

On Friday, Eddie leaves the office early. Richie is getting a drink with some Brooklyn comedian he knows, and Eddie takes the train to meet them. The idea of going to a beer garden in Brooklyn to hang out with two professional comedians should be enough to make him walk into the sea, but he’s driven there by sheer want—the want to see Richie in every context, and the want to make this thing between them real by bringing it into the light. Richie waves him over, grinning hugely, when he catches sight of Eddie squinting through the smoky darkness. Neither of Eddie’s fears come true: they’re not the oldest people there, and the comedian is a surprisingly mellow guy who Eddie doesn’t have to pretend to like. They stay for a long time, talking about the New York comedy scene, and then about the client who has accidentally sent Eddie photos of his chihuahua in a Princess Leia costume on two separate occasions, and then about the Halloween event Richie’s hosting in a few weeks. Eddie tries to order a gin and grapefruit, but Richie shoves his shoulder affectionately, tells the bartender that Eddie’s new in town, and orders him something that’s light and not too hoppy. 

Eddie's not sure where he and Richie stand in terms of announcing themselves to the world—he tries out the phrase _and this is my boyfriend_ in his head and feels like he's about fifteen—but Richie doesn't seem worried. Richie shoves him and grins at him and slings his arm around him so freely, that by the end of the night Eddie assumes his friend must figure they’re either fucking, or some truly insane example of lifelong friends. Or both. 

Eddie doesn’t _think_ he’s drunk when they get home, but he must be a little, because he winds up across from Richie in the living room, doing something like dancing while Butthole Surfers and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and other terribly named bands that they used to love play through the shitty speakers on Eddie’s ThinkPad. Eddie can’t really dance, more of a mental block than a physical one, but he can nod aggressively, and every time he nods extra hard Richie cheers like he’s really doing something. It’s fucking weird, how the music comes back to him—great to know that the brain space that could’ve gone to learning another language has apparently been occupied by _ska_ —but watching the same thing happen to Richie makes it worth it. The way Richie pogos and flails his arms and tosses his head around makes Eddie laugh so hard he starts hiccuping, which just about does it for his self-perception as a grown man.

In bed that night, Richie rolls over and kisses Eddie’s shoulder, and says, “I should probably go home this weekend.” Eddie doesn’t say anything to that, just curls his arms around Richie and holds him tight and thinks, _no._

But then Sunday comes around again, and Eddie gets up, and feeds Richie two pieces of flaxseed toast, and drives him to LaGuardia.

This goodbye is nothing like the last one. Eddie has gotten greedier. If Richie were to ask, _“Do you really want me to go?”_ Eddie would say no, and then he would reach across Richie to slam the car door shut, and take them home, where it’s starting to feel like he belongs. 

Richie doesn’t ask, though. Instead, he looks gloomily out the window at the airport terminal, and gathers up the tote bag of RXBARs and Advil and hand sanitizer that Eddie is forcing him to take. 

“I’m gonna miss it here,” Richie says. “Now that I’ve seen all the rats in their homecoming dresses, sucks I’m gonna miss prom.” 

“Well, you’re a grownup,” Eddie says, the less bitter version of what he’s thinking. He puts his hand on the back of Richie’s neck and scratches the soft hairs there, ordering his brain to remember exactly how they feel. “Just come back.”

+

In December, snow softens out the city, absorbing sound until the streets are almost quiet. Eddie still remembers what real quiet sounds like, and the New York version of peace on earth strikes him largely as bullshit, but still. Lights have gone up all down the street, and families walk close together. Fat white snowflakes fall just as gently in Manhattan as they do in Maine. 

The city is dusted with the first real snowfall of the season, making midtown into an entirely new place. Eddie and Ben have been making their way around Bryant Park, killing time with the winter village vendors. 

Eddie had spotted Ben sniffling into his veggie japchae the night before, so he drags him through the vendors until they find a stall advertising “organic tonics,” and buys him a cloudy turmeric ginger shot. It’s the kind of thing Richie will only drink with a lot of teasing and dramatic face-pulling, but Ben downs it gamely, and even adds a cheerful “Mmm!” when he’s finished.

“Bev won the lottery with you, bro,” Eddie tells him, although he’s also thinking that if Richie started going “Mmm!” after sucking down a health drink, Eddie would be forced to leave him. 

Ben grins at him, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Speaking of the lady—looks like they’re wrapping up.” He laughs, and shows Eddie a blurry picture of Beverly on her ass in the middle of the busy skating rink. "I think they’re having plenty of fun without us, though.”

“Thank god.” It’s past four now, getting dark, and the winter village is swarming. “Where are they?”

“The Overlook. Up there?”

It’s the top level of the tallest glass enclosure surrounding the rink, where tired families can warm up and rest and watch the skaters below. Eddie and Ben push through the crowd and head upstairs, Ben repeating “Excuse me, excuse me,” with a southern warmness that would make Stan proud, if he would deign to come to midtown.

Stepping into the Overlook feels like entering a greenhouse. The wall-to-wall windows pull in bright winter sun, and the people sitting around at the terrace-style tables are shedding their coats and scarves.

“You see ‘em?” Eddie asks, minor concession to Ben’s height, and Ben cranes his neck, smiles, and nods.

Beverly and Richie are at the far side of the Overlook, sitting slumped in two prime examples of bad posture. They look worn out, but they’re chatting happily, holding hands over the table. Bev catches sight of them first, and breaks out beaming like the sun.

Ben leans down to hug her around the shoulders and kisses her cheek. “Having fun?”

“No,” Bev says, squeezing Ben’s arm, and cracks up. “Richie cannot skate.”

“She’s a real snob for someone who goes out on the ice looking like a Viking funeral,” Richie says. “What do you call that move when you fall so hard your skates send up sparks? Winter fire?” 

Ben flushes red at that, but Bev throws her head back and laughs. Richie tilts his face up, offering himself to Eddie expectantly. 

“If I kiss you everyone here is gonna think we’re in some kind of four-way relationship,” Eddie tells him, but then does it anyway. He’s never been one for PDA before, but Richie always wants it—and there’s something thrilling about even the occasional discomfort, a little rollercoaster ride every time. When he straightens up Ben looks so sappy Eddie wants to roll his eyes. 

“Did you eat anything?” he asks Richie. 

Beverly and Richie look at each other. Richie starts snorting.

“Don’t you dare, Tozier,” Bev says.

“We shared some fries,” Richie says, shaking with helpless laughter. “They were sixteen dollars.”

Bev throws her hands up. “Useless! Never ask this one to keep a secret.”

“I’m charging you sixteen extra dollars on utilities this month,” Eddie tells Richie. It's a pretty absurd joke, considering how, when Eddie finally sat them down and made them talk money, it turned out Richie's annual income was about ten times more than his. Eddie is still trying to decide what to do with that information. It feels too soon and too risky to start combining income, like that'll put a jinx on things, but it's also so absurd to act like money means to Richie what it means to normal people. 

Richie paid all the fees on the new apartment, paying a whole extra month of rent so he could spend weeks lazily settling in. He's still got his place in LA, too, which is how Eddie justifies the move after only two months. Richie’s career isn't going to move overnight, no matter what he insists he wants. There's nothing wrong with keeping options open, if only to satisfy the nervous part of Eddie's brain that still wants to spin the undeniable whirlwind of the past few months into something responsible.

"That should be eight," Richie says. "I split it."

"I'm charging you sixteen,” Eddie says, “and you can Venmo Beverly the eight that you owe her."

Ben squints. “I’m still trying to understand sixteen dollars for fries."

"They had duck on them," Richie says, and dissolves into laughter again.

"And they were worth it," Bev adds. "But I'll take my eight dollars back."

They walk a block to get away from the crowd, and stand in a tight circle on the sidewalk while Richie orders a Lyft back to the UWS. 

“If we’d taken that place in Kips Bay we could walk home,” Eddie grouses dutifully as Richie punches in their address. 

“But then you wouldn’t get that Mediterranean place,” Bev says, her eyes rolling back in remembered culinary joy. 

“I would’ve lived,” says Eddie, but Bev is right. He wouldn’t get that Mediterranean place, or early morning runs along the Hudson, or the ten-minute walk to Central Park. It is all pretty nice. He still gets the odd bolt of loyalty to Astoria, the oasis that it was for him, but being right in the city again feels good.

“If we’d taken that place in Kips Bay we would’ve run into my ex by now,” Richie says, watching their driver turn the corner on his phone screen. His fingers are turning blueish white, and Eddie makes a mental note to buy him a pair of those cell phone compatible gloves. “You wouldn’t like that.”

Ben, the only sucker left amongst them, opens his mouth to ask.

“Michael J. Fox,” Eddie supplies before he gets the chance. “Who is married with four kids.”

“Yeah, and I’m great with kids, what’s your point.”

Richie really is great with kids, a realization that has made Eddie feel like he is losing his mind. Dogs like Richie too, even though Eddie knows that when he was twelve he’d been bitten on the arm by a neighborhood mutt who did not want to make friends, and by rights that experience should still make him reek with fear. 

That’s not the kind of thing Richie’s afraid of, though. Sometimes Eddie thinks about the things that do scare Richie, and about the three months he had spent alone in LA with no assurance of how things were going to turn out for him. That thought makes Eddie want to throttle someone, possibly himself. Feeling protective, he grabs Richie’s left hand. 

“As if you could land Marty McFly,” Eddie says, and tucks Richie’s freezing hand into his own pocket. 

They’ve had the new apartment since November, but Eddie has only been sleeping there since his old lease ended a few weeks ago. Richie returned to New York that same day, this time with a fat duffle bag stuffed with clothes and his own toothbrush and the complete _Tremors_ collection. In LA, a month earlier, Eddie had dragged Richie through his sprawling ranch, interrogating him about his attachment to furniture and kitchen appliances before accepting that the only thing Richie really wanted to bring was the pool. Richie had been much happier to take a different approach: lying half naked across Eddie’s chest on one of his uncomfortable modernist sofas, the two of them scrolling through Crate and Barrel and arguing about the relative appeal of a metal or wooden bed frame. 

Eddie brought cookware and his two barstools, stuffing them into his company car on a freezing Sunday morning. Richie’s DVD collection has been slowly migrating cross-country in a series of overly insured USPS packages. But other than that the apartment is full of new stuff—stuff they've picked together. It’s a return to compromise, for Eddie, but a compromise of a new sort. This time, it fits him.

In their building, the four of them pile into the elevator, despite Richie’s pointed concern that Ben’s muscles will tilt them over the weight limit. Eddie still gets a burst of adrenaline when he pushes the button that takes them up, up to their bright, strange new place, up to the place that is theirs. 

Stan and Patty are sitting facing each other on the new couch when Eddie opens the door, shopping bags strewn at their feet, in stitches over a clock they’d bought in the shape of a baleful-looking hippo. Eddie’s happy for Stanley, and a little impressed. Somehow he had gone out into a world full of strangers and found a person who shakes so much happiness out of him. The odds of that feel staggering.

"Nerds," Richie says, grinning at them as he tosses his coat over a chair. "Where's Bill?" 

"In the office," Stan says, laughter still all over his face. "There's a surprise in there."

"For who?" Bev asks, frowning.

"Go find out."

Calling it "the office" is pretty generous. Right now it's mostly storage space for half-constructed furniture, full of stacked boxes Eddie had dragged out of sight in a last-ditch attempt at organization half an hour before their friends started to arrive. 

Richie shoulders the door open, the rest of them trailing behind him like curious schoolkids. He takes one look and lets out a shocked laugh, Eddie and Bev craning their necks around him.

Bill is sitting on a stack of cardboard boxes, surrounded by styrofoam and bubble wrap. Across from him, in Eddie’s newly assembled office chair, is Mike—the only one of them who wasn’t supposed to make it. 

"No way," says Bev, and then they're all pouring into the room in a mass of excited squawks and hugs and disbelief. 

Mike is wearing that fresh-off-a-plane look, a little damp and sleepy, but smiling.

"Hey guys," he says, half-stifled in a bear hug from Ben.

“What the fuck, dude!” Eddie exclaims, punching his arm. “I thought you were supposed to be in Tucson right now!”

“I went to Tucson,” Mike says, so calm, the way he always was. “And then I got homesick. Heading back up to the 207 to spend Christmas with my grandma. Figured I could spare you all a day or two."

“He got homesick,” Richie echoes. “Mikey, buddy, amazing to see you, but weren’t you trapped in a New England attic for like thirty years?” 

“I’m not staying,” Mike says, giving Richie another clap on the shoulder. “But it’s the holidays. We should be together.”

“For auld lang syne,” Bill says, nodding. “Bet Joyce misses you, but if you need a break, you’re more than welcome upstate. Audra’s coming on Monday, she'd love to have someone around who’s not related to me.” 

Mike hasn’t booked a hotel room yet—just showed up with a backpack and a too-light coat. The sight of it hanging by the doorway throws Eddie back into the memory of Richie two months earlier, leaning against a deli window with no bag and no plan. He feels a surge of admiration for both of them, and then for all of their friends, all brave in different ways. 

Between the eight of them, they have a big AirBnB, a hotel suite, and Eddie and Richie’s creamy new sleeper sofa. Eddie and Bev set up the couch while the rest of them crowd the kitchen to make dinner from the groceries Stan and Patty had picked up earlier. Bev is evening out her side of the blanket when there’s a clang in the kitchen, and then a commotion of excited voices.

Bev catches Eddie’s eye over the pull-out couch and snorts. “Do you remember in the hospital,” she asks, “when you woke up and immediately told us to stop fighting?”

“Vaguely,” Eddie says. He leans over the pull-out mattress and gives it an experimental push. “I remember you being loud.”

Beverly plops down on the mattress, rolling onto her back. “We should get Patty flowers for putting up with this.”

Eddie sits down next to her. “I think she can hold her own just fine.”

“She better be able to. Can’t escape once you’re part of the family.” Bev sits up, crossing her legs, and gives Eddie a smile. “We did good, didn’t we? I’m proud of us.”

It means something, to know she sees it that way—Eddie’s new life back in the city and hers in Chicago as two sides of the same victory. He can give her this, the opportunity to feel proud of herself by accepting that the pride includes him. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Me too.”

When they go into the kitchen, only half of them are still working on dinner—Ben and Bill finding dishes, and Stan concocting a suspicious looking homemade salad dressing. Mike, Patty, and Richie are at the kitchen table, groaning and exclaiming over something on Richie’s phone.

Bev goes to wrap her arms around Ben, and Eddie wanders to the table, putting his hands on Richie’s shoulders.

“What is it?” he asks, but he can see—it’s a webpage from some animal shelter, boasting dozens of images of scraggly looking cats. “Richie, _again?”_

“I can’t stop until we do something!” Richie says. “There are more of them every day!”

“Show him Wagon,” Patty says.

Richie scrolls until he finds Wagon—a short-haired black cat missing an eyeball and the tip of one ear. She’s crouched low in her picture, looking up with her one huge green eye. 

“Oh, Jesus,” says Eddie.

Mike plucks the phone out of Richie’s hand. “Beautiful Wagon,” he reads, in his perfect storytime voice, “is ready for adoption. This shy but sweet three-year-old girl had a hard start to life, rejected by her mother—”

“Fuck,” says Eddie.

“—and attacked by another street cat when she was still a kitten. Having one eye doesn’t bother her at all, and doesn’t require any extra care, but don’t be surprised if she bumps into a wall or two—”

_“No.”_

“—while she’s getting to know her new space. Despite being nervous around other cats, Wagon loves to curl up in a warm lap, or to climb onto her person’s shoulders. Once she warms up to you, you’ll be rewarded with purrs, kisses, chirps, and gentle head bumps. Wagon is looking for a home where she can be the only kitty, with plenty of places to nap when the world gets overwhelming.”

“Stop,” Eddie says. But then, because he can’t help himself, “Where is she?”

“Hell’s Kitchen,” Richie says. “Eds, _Wagon.”_

“I know, I have ears—” 

“Unlike Wagon!”

“Black cats take the longest to get adopted,” Patty interrupts smoothly. She leans back and calls out to Stan, “How much longer do black cats take to get adopted?”

“Two or three times longer!” Stan calls back.

“Two or three times,” Patty informs them, like they hadn’t heard. She shrugs. “And that’s for cats with two eyes. Stanley thinks a cat would slip out and ravage the bird feeders, but otherwise…”

“Do we have plans tomorrow?” Mike asks. “Field trip to meet Wagon?”

 _“Please,”_ says Patty. “New York will be here next year, but who knows about _Wagon.”_

Eddie grimaces. “If we meet her, we’re _just_ meeting her.”

“Okay, let’s move,” Ben says, coming over with hands full of plates and glasses. They scrape their chairs back and set the table together, loading it up with roasted potatoes and lemon sole and bottles of wine. The table just fits the eight of them, with lefthanded Bev and Bill strategically placed to avoid banging elbows. 

It’s a good meal, good and loud and satisfying. They clean up together afterward, Stan moving appliances around to scrub the counter. Then they pile up in the living room, on the pull-out mattress and the loveseat and the floor. Stan gains control of the remote and grimly starts queuing up interview clips of Bill and Richie and Bev. The interviews would be pretty innocuous under normal circumstances, but under the influence of wine and a house full of friends, they’re almost unbearably funny. Bill puts his head in his arms during one particularly incriminating clip where he discusses his _process,_ the rest of them laughing and jeering and throwing pillows at the screen until Stan reminds them not to break anything.

Eddie is a little tipsy, getting there quickly, the way he’s learning he does when he’s already loose-limbed with warmth and comfort. When Bev starts complaining about getting cold he gets up to find her a sweater, taking the opportunity to be alone for a moment and check that he can still focus on his own reflection in the bedroom mirror. 

He’s rifling through the closet when Richie comes in. Eddie refuses to sleep in a mess, so their bedroom is in better shape than the rest of the house. Richie barely has any bags to sidestep as he steps behind Eddie and wraps his arms around him.

“Hey,” Eddie says. He’d almost decided he wasn’t really drunk after all, but he could’ve been wrong. Richie’s arms around him make him feel unsteady. “Separation anxiety’s getting pretty serious.”

“It’s been serious,” Richie mutters into the nape of Eddie’s neck. 

Richie’s breath on his neck makes Eddie want to squirm, but he ignores it well enough to pull a blue sweater off the shelf that he thinks wouldn’t offend Bev’s fashion designer sensibilities too much.

“Just wanted to say,” Richie says, “if you’ve analyzed the risk of impulse adopting a cat tomorrow, and it’s real high, I can say it’s too heartbreaking and we shouldn't go. I don’t mind being the stick in the mud.”

Eddie turns around. “No one would fall for that,” he says. He leans in and kisses Richie, putting a hand on his waist. “I’m not gonna accidentally adopt a cat. We’re not all suckers.”

Richie still goes lax whenever Eddie kisses him, and Eddie hasn’t gotten tired of watching it happen yet. Maybe never will. 

“Okay,” Richie says. “Just remember you said that if, like, I pet one cat and have a breakdown.”

He’s not about to say it, but Eddie thinks there are worse things than impulsively adopting an animal who needs a home. It wouldn't even be that impulsive. Richie has been talking about cats for a while, in that just-joking-unless-you’re-serious kind of way. Maybe a little stupid, considering Richie will be back on tour at some point, and then it would just be Eddie and some rejected animal puttering around the apartment together. But that thought isn’t really depressing, either—it’s sort of nice, even, to think there would be another living creature in the apartment when Richie’s away.

“I know what I’m getting into,” Eddie says. He skims his hand over Richie’s stomach, pausing at his fly. “You can’t surprise me anymore.”

“Foreshadowing our divorce,” Richie says.

“Shut up,” Eddie tells him. He tucks his hand into the front of Richie’s jeans, reaching down to palm his dick. “That won’t happen.” 

Richie groans. He’s soft, of course, but Eddie knows now that he can be ready to go surprisingly quickly. 

“You menace,” Richie says. “They’re gonna think we’re fucking in here.”

Over Richie’s shoulder, Eddie can see the top of their new oak bed frame. They do fuck in here, he thinks, and their friends know that. Maybe not in those words—he hopes they haven’t thought those words—but abstractly, they all know.

Half a year ago the idea would make him bristle, but that’s not the case anymore. This is his now. That’s the difference—this is _his,_ and Richie’s, and they know it better than anyone else. Anyone in the world might be able to see it, but only two people on earth know its full weight and shape. It’s theirs. It belongs to them.

He squeezes Richie gently in his hand. With his other hand, he grabs hold of Richie’s hair and brings him down for another kiss, bumping against his glasses. 

_I’m gonna fuck you later,_ he thinks as hard as he can, because he’s still working up to being able to just say that shit out loud. Right now, he can think it with all his might, doing what he can to blaze it into Richie with his hands and mouth. _I’m going to make it so good you won’t be able to do anything but lie there and look at me._

“Okay,” he says, when he thinks Richie has gotten the message. He pulls back, sliding his hand out of Richie’s jeans. “Behave yourself.”

“Behave _myself?”_

“Yes,” Eddie says. He pushes Richie’s hair back from his forehead, straightening him out. Then, steered by some still strange impulse, he ruffles Richie’s hair in the opposite direction, messing it up again. Let them know.

He gives Richie one more soft kiss, smoothing a hand down his chest. He takes his hand, and leads him back to join their friends.

**Author's Note:**

> i cannot believe this thing is seeing the light of day. i drafted this in SEPTEMBER, shelved it for months and months, and then had the most uphill battle finishing it for some reason. [orestesfasting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orestesfasting) is always my best editor and cheerleader, but she deserves a million dollars for holding my hand through every section of this one. she probably did more work motivating me to finish this when i was pretty set on flushing it down the toilet than i did by actually writing it. 
> 
> name from [one of the best songs ever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOCkmaOFEUg)
> 
> i continue to [sort of be on tumblr,](https://jonasblackwood.tumblr.com/) shoutout to you if you witnessed my extremely brief time on clown twitter before i remembered most social media has a kind of no-face-in-the-bathhouse effect on me lol


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